Historically, the sale of commercial passenger or cargo flight space is affected largely by the information seen on the display terminal of a Central Reservation System ("CRS"). The quantity and type of information describing an airline's flight services is known as the airline's screen presence. Screen presence is an important aspect of the flight reservation process since passenger demand is often influenced by the actions of travel agents, and travel agents are influenced in turn by the information appearing on a CRS screen.
For example, a travel agent will often sell flight services in the order in which they are displayed on the travel agent's reservation system screen. Thus, for a given customer request, flight services displayed first or near the top of the CRS screen display will often be sold before other services.
Screen presence is influenced by flight factors such as origin, destination, travel time, type of aircraft, number of stops, number of connecting points and costs. In a given market flights may be displayed in ascending order depending on overall travel time, number of connecting points and number of stops. Thus, changes in the flight factors will have an effect on the carrier's screen presence and correspondingly on its bookings in a given market.
Until the present invention, the airline carrier was unaware of the screen presence of its scheduled flights in a given market, as compared to the screen presence of its competitors. Where two or more flights would satisfy a particular consumer request, the CRS must determine which services and in what order to display them on the CRS screen. The selection, preference, and ranking of flight services depends primarily on established build, edit, sort, and display rules which vary from CRS to CRS.
Various systems have been proposed for managing the air space available on a carrier's scheduled flights or for tracking the availability of the carrier's flights. While many of these prior art systems allow consumers to contract and confirm reservations for scheduled and available flight space, these prior art systems do not provide the airline or travel agent a way to simulate the reservation process used in selling commercial flight space to the consumer. Furthermore, these prior art systems do not give the individual airline carrier a way to compare the screen presence of its scheduled flights to that of its competitors.
The ability to simulate the flight service request process by taking into consideration CRS flight service ranking rules, such as provided by the present invention, allows the travel provider to ascertain the screen presence of its scheduled flights and compare it to the screen presence of its competitors. This information gives the travel provider a decisive advantage and allows it to adjust flight factors to improve screen presence in a specific market, region, or an entire service market.
Furthermore, the ability to make changes in a carrier's scheduled flights and visualize how these changes impact the flight carrier's screen presence, allow it to determine how such changes effect the number of bookings in a given market. In this respect, the present invention provides the travel provider a way to visualize how changes in its scheduled flights will impact its potential revenues.